‘Boys are Better than Girls!’. ‘That’s not True! Girls are Kind, Boys are Rude!’. Dialogic Mediation of Gender Conflicts as an Opportunity for Promoting Respect and Equality

The paper presents an analysis of research data recently collected through the video-recording of adult-children interactions and conflicts between children, during discussion activities on cultural and gender differences within Italian educational contexts. The general objective is to show the ways in which conflicts among classmates display the relevance of gender, the forms of communication adults can use to manage gender conflicts and the effects of these forms on children’s participation. A more specific aim is to draw attention to dialogic, narrative and transformative mediation in managing gender conflicts among classmate, an aspect not sufficiently investigated until now. In cases of gender conflicts, dialogic, narrative, and transformative mediation can be interpreted as a form of communication in which the mediator, adopting dialogic actions, challenges stereotypes and bias, promotes dialogue and understanding between the parties, and seeks to support and to co-construct new narratives of their relationships, based on respect for mutual differences and equality.